Inflation Adjustment

by Editor
August 19, 2014 at 9:49 am

https://www.smartertimes.com/1269/inflation-adjustment

A dispatch from Illinois about the Olmsted Locks and Dam on the Ohio River reports that it was "first authorized by Congress in 1988 at a cost of $775 million" and is "now scheduled to be completed in 2020 at a cost approaching $3 billion."

The U.S. government's consumer price index inflation calculator indicates that $775 million in 1988 dollars are about $1.56 billion in 2014 dollars. The calculator doesn't run to 2020, but by then even more of the story won't be typically scandalous government cost overruns, but the erosion of the value of the dollar.

In other articles, the Times sometimes tries to account for this by adjusting for inflation, as it attempted to do with some movie box office statistics in the Robin Williams obituary. But it's disappointingly inconsistent about when it does this and when it doesn't. In this case, the Times doesn't make any mention of inflation, and a reader may suspect it is because it makes the story about the dam cost overrun seem less newsworthy, or at least turn it into a story less about the dam and the Army Corps of Engineers and instead more about the Federal Reserve and its overseers in Congress.

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